The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (11 page)

No one involved with the Petiot case has ever quite understood the doctor's curious release by the Germans, who ordinarily preferred certainty to justice and shot people for much less than actually admitting participation in a Resistance group, as he had. Some of Petiot's opponents would later insinuate that he had agreed to work for the Gestapo, or else that he had told them the truth—that he really murdered his primarily Jewish candidates for escape—and the Gestapo were willing to tolerate a free-lance comrade who was, in his own modest way, doing some of their work for them. This is scarcely believable. On the other hand, one can suppose the Gestapo intended to keep Petiot under surveillance after releasing him, in hopes of discovering secrets he had not revealed under torture. The Germans were not particularly successful: just two months later, one of those secrets—in the form of piles of bodies—was found in the basement of Petiot's house.

When, in April 1944, Judge Berry asked Maurice Petiot about his brother's unexpected release, Maurice described the circumstances:

A policeman in the commissaire's [Jodkum's] group told me it was he who had arranged for my brother's liberation, and that there was practically nothing left in his dossier (in fact, they could not even find my brother's papers to return to me when the commissaire asked for them). This policeman added that he was disgusted by the whole thing, and that out of eight people they held at the time of my brother's arrest, only two were left … the others had disappeared.

Besides, even under torture my brother admitted nothing—he had spent eight months in solitary confinement [
sic
], and after everything he had gone through, the German commissaire did not think he could do anything more against Germany.

When I went with the money, the commissaire showed admiration for my brother, and he told me there were only two things they could do with him: convict him and deport him to the salt mines, from which he would never return, or execute him; or else free him—they could no longer just hold him in prison.

He said to me: “Your brother is sick, you will take care of him; I cannot bring myself to liquidate a man such as he. He has been deceived by his ideals, but I am giving him the chance to return to his patients, as long as he behaves himself.” He said this despite the fact that during their last interview, my brother had shouted out his hatred for the German régime.

Fourrier and Pintard were released on January 11, 1944. They had told all they knew, and the Germans realized this amounted to nothing at all. Petiot himself was discharged two days later. Maurice and Georgette went to Paris and awaited him at the Hôtel Alicot on the rue de Bercy, and he accompanied them back to Auxerre for twelve days to recuperate. Georgette was surprisingly understanding and uninquisitive. Since she considered Nézondet dishonest and scheming, she did not mention his revelations about the corpses at the rue Le Sueur. She told Judge Berry:

I did not speak about it to my husband, because I did not want to reveal the shameful attitude of his friend and cause trouble between them. I simply asked my husband for an explanation of the Dreyfus case and the disappearance with which they accused him. He replied, “You can't fight a war without killing men any more than you can make an omelette without breaking eggs,” and added that he had done nothing wrong, and that the best proof of this was that the Germans had let him go. With that, my complete confidence in him was restored.

Judge Berry found Georgette's blind trust in her husband uncanny considering his past, but could only conclude that she was telling the truth when she said that Marcel couldn't stand people meddling in his affairs and did not like questions; consequently, she never asked any. Throughout the investigation, despite all the facts gathered, the question of just who Petiot was remained unanswered. No image of a human personality emerged, no motive surfaced; one could scarcely even imagine simple greed or sadism in a person who seemed to exist only as an incredibly dexterous performer. Petiot had fooled the French, the Germans, the Resistants, the courts, psychiatrists, his friends, and his own wife. He had acted as a solitary enigmatic force amidst a world in which he did not participate, and which he regarded only with scorn.

*
The same tactic was successfully used for a different purpose in August 1941, when a hundred cyclists “raced” across the Belgian border carrying four tons of black-market wheat on their backs.

*
Police investigators working on the Petiot case later also found evidence that Annette Basset, who had left with Réocreux, sent her mother a money order on November 1—a month after her disappearance. This puzzle was never solved.

*
Adrien's brother Emile Estébétéguy, who also worked at the rue Lauriston and was later shot with Lafont at the end of the war, believed Lafont had known about Petiot and had sent his brother to him as a convenient means of disposing of Adrien. There is no evidence to support this, and Lafont, who generally admitted his crimes, denied it.

5

THE WEIGHT OF THE EVIDENCE

Van Bever, Madame Khaït, Guschinov, Dreyfus, the nine pimps and prostitutes—thirteen was a rather impressive number of murder victims, but scarcely the final total. Petiot had mentioned at least three other “passages” to Fourrier, and only the case of Guschinov, the rue Caumartin furrier, matched a previously identified victim. The objects found at the rue Le Sueur represented a large number of people, but few of the items were useful for purposes of identification, and those that were only led back to known victims. The man in the photograph found at the house was identified as Joseph “le Boxeur” Réocreux. Sylvia Rosa, a Marseille dressmaker, recalled making the black dress with golden swallows for a licensed prostitute named Paulette; she easily identified Joséphine “Paulette” Grippay from a police photograph. A small, round woman's hat with a feather made by Suzanne Talbot in Paris, on the other hand, had been sold to the Princess Colloredo de Mansfeld in 1934. The police report on the hat demonstrated remarkable thoroughness, coming to the plodding conclusion: “The investigation [of the hat] was not pressed further, given that the princess is alive and once lived in the building on the rue Le Sueur. Consequently she cannot be considered as one of Dr. Petiot's victims, and one may plausibly believe that she left the aforementioned hat behind when she sold the building.”

Interviews with Petiot's neighbors in the rue Le Sueur provided some interesting information. Many of them claimed to have seen Petiot several times during the period when he was, in fact, in prison. At least one neighbor supplied an intriguing hint of mistaken identity. One day the previous year she had called over Dr. Petiot to give him some mistakenly delivered mail, only to realize at the last minute that it was really another man who closely resembled the doctor: Maurice Petiot, whom some of the neighbors had seen delivering the lime. They were equally certain that some time the previous summer he had come to 21 rue Le Sueur and removed a large number of suitcases. A woman who lived directly across the street was sitting in her window with her daughter during the removal, and they had counted forty-seven suitcases and trunks; she felt sure this was not the total figure, since she had noticed Maurice only after the loading began. The removal van was a battered gray truck with a side panel reading T
RANSPORTS
—
AVENUE
D
AUMESNIL
.

Commissaire Massu sent a special inspector to search the entire avenue Daumesnil, which stretches for more than two miles past the place de la Bastille, the Gare de Lyon, and off into the suburbs. The detective checked all garages and trucking firms in the neighborhood and inquired at the local commissariat—all without success. But in the course of his search he grew friendly with the truckers, one of whom thought he had heard that someone at the Hôtel Alicot on the nearly rue de Bercy had once asked two drivers to pick up suitcases in the sixteenth arrondissement. These drivers identified Maurice Petiot as the man who had approached them, but they had been unable to do the job and did not know who had. The owner of a garage next to the Hôtel Alicot said that the Manjeard Company had brought a load of suitcases to her garage, and that from there they had been taken to the Gare de Lyon by an Arab known as the Frizzy (he denied it). At the Gare de Lyon baggage office, records showed that on May 26, 1943, five days after the Germans arrested his brother, Maurice Petiot had dispatched forty-five suitcases, weighing a total of 683 kilograms, to Auxerre.

Confronted with this evidence, Maurice admitted having removed clothing from the house. When Georgette had given him Nézondet's strange message, he had gone to the rue Le Sueur, believing this was the only possible place where his brother could have hidden anything. He had found nothing unusual, though he was surprised, he admitted, by the large quantity of clothing. Even this could be explained by Marcel's almost irrational drive to purchase everything and anything at auction—he had once bought a lot consisting of three hundred gabardine raincoats. Maurice removed the clothes because, quite simply, he feared the Germans would take them when they searched the building, as he was sure they would. As to the present location of the suitcases, the same driver who had helped with the lime, Jean Eustache, had driven them to Courson-les-Carrières, where they were stored in the attic of Albert Neuhausen, the mysterious friend Maurice first claimed had spent the night at his rue des Lombards house in Auxerre.

Inspector Batut drove to Courson and arrested Neuhausen's wife Simone and Léone Arnoux. The latter was the former maid and mistress of Georgette Petiot's late father, and it was learned that she had made several mysterious trips between Auxerre and Courson, and had removed some items from the suitcases for herself and for Maurice's family. Albert Neuhausen was not at home—he was on a business trip in Paris, staying at the now familiar Hôtel Alicot, where he was arrested the next day and charged with accepting stolen goods and obstructing justice. The people of Courson gathered in the square across the street from the Neuhausen residence as a crew of policemen lowered forty-nine trunks and suitcases from the attic window to the sidewalk. The Gare de Lyon baggage tickets were still attached to them; police discovered that eight of the forty-five suitcases sent from Paris were missing, meaning that twelve new suitcases had been stored with the others, and the missing ones must be hidden elsewhere.

The contents of these forty-nine bags were astonishing and would have filled the shelves of a small store. Among 1,760 items the Police Judiciaire catalogued at the quai des Orfèvres headquarters in Paris were:

Considering that at least Van Bever and Madame Khaït had left home without luggage, and that Petiot had told the other escapees to travel light, what were police to make of three-quarters of a ton of clothing? If such a vast collection of clothes really belonged to the dead, it obviously represented a great many victims. Nor was this all: combined with articles found at the rue Le Sueur, the rue Caumartin, and in Maurice's two houses at Auxerre, police would end up with a final tally of eighty-three suitcases, plus umbrellas, canes, and assorted other objects. The total weight of the evidence against Petiot was nearly three tons.

Léone Arnoux, Georgette's father's mistress and maid, refused to cooperate with the police. As she did not believe Dr. Petiot guilty of murder, she said, there could be no victims, and hence the contents of the suitcases were not stolen goods and she was not guilty of receiving them. She defended her right to remove articles for the use of the Petiot family. One of these items, a gaudy silk tie with Adrien Estébétéguy's initials, had been around Gérard Petiot's neck when police questioned him at his uncle's house in Auxerre. At one point Léone Arnoux said Monique Petiot, Maurice's wife, had asked her to hide the suitcases; later she said her instructions were just the opposite. Albert Neuhausen claimed to know nothing about the suitcases; Maurice had simply not wanted to keep them in his own house because he was afraid the Germans might come there, too. He had never gone near them, Neuhausen said at first, but when suspicious sheets and clothing were found in his bureau drawers, he admitted having taken a few things out to dry after melting snow leaked through the roof and damaged some of the suitcases, and he had apparently forgotten to put them back.

There was also a question about whether Georgette Petiot knew of the existence of the suitcases. Apparently, while staying at Auxerre, she had asked Maurice to stop at the rue Caumartin apartment during a trip to Paris and bring some of her clothes to her. He packed them in a suitcase that was inadvertently mixed up with those sent to Neuhausen's house. At one point Maurice and Georgette had gone to Courson to find her misplaced things, and on this point the
juge d'instruction
spent weeks interrogating Georgette, Maurice, and Madame Neuhausen—separately and together—trying to determine whether Maurice had gone to the Neuhausen attic alone, or whether Georgette had accompanied him and consequently knew more than she cared to admit.